In a search for light in the tunnels of previous dark times, poets responded with lines depicting cruelties yet leavened with resilience and hope. The English romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Russian resistance poet Osip Mandelstam cherished what they judged to be a panacea like quality in poetry. Shelley forecast that by crafting images of humanity, poets could become the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Pessimism in response to Trump’s triumph in the US has added to despair experienced over genocide in Gaza, torture in Israeli detention centres, bombing in Lebanon, famine and slaughter in Sudan, Russian savagery in Ukraine.
In a search for light in the tunnels of previous dark times, poets responded with lines depicting cruelties yet leavened with resilience and hope. The English romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Russian resistance poet Osip Mandelstam cherished what they judged to be a panacea like quality in poetry.
Shelley forecast that by crafting images of humanity, poets could become the unacknowledged legislators of the world. In response to brutalities in Stalinist Russia, Mandelstam recommended, ‘The people need poetry that will be their own secret, that will keep them awake for ever, and bathe them in the bright-hired wave of its breathing.’
Extremities of despair
Reflection via poetry on how to endure long term imprisonment has been a life saver for prisoners. In ‘Letters from a Man in Solitary’, the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet recalled, ‘Trees may grow in the yard, but I’m not allowed to see the sky overhead…To talk to anyone beside myself is forbidden. so I talk to myself.’
He also wrote ‘Since I was Thrown Inside’, ‘The earth has gone around the sun ten times, …the ovens at Dachau hadn’t been lit, nor the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.’
In what reads as a forecast of Ukrainians’ current response to death & destruction by Putin forces, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova reflected on cruelties in the Soviet Union. Her first husband had been executed, her second husband died in prison. In ‘Requiem’ she wrote, ‘No foreign sky protected me, no stranger’s wing shields my face, I stand as witness to the common lot, survivor of that time, that place.’
Inhumanities in trench warfare in the First World War generated feelings that this devastation might never end, a prognosis described beautifully and sadly in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth.’
‘What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes, Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor of girls’ brow shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.’
Perhaps less well known is the despair of people in our midst but easily forgotten. Australian Vietnamese poet Amy Tong highlights feelings buried in the bodies and minds of Vietnamese women who are Australian citizens, ‘We are fragmented shards, blown here by a war no-one wants to remember.’
The Rohingya poet Mayya Ali reflects that her people have been persecuted, punished, discarded and forgotten. Therefore she pleads, ‘We need activism in our poems so we can tell the world of our suffering.’ A companion Rohingya poet Yasmin Ullah writes in ‘Birth’, ‘I am a Rohingya, I was born one of the forgotten, one of those the world doesn’t quite remember…There is more to Rohingya than exodus !’
Indifference fosters despair
Despite end of the world inhumanities in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Sudan, Ukraine, focus groups assembled by Australia’s major political parties insist that the cost of living is the priority issue and possibly the only one. In that respect, German poet playwright Bertolt Brecht criticised citizens who remained unaware of, or not bothered by the long term effects of abusive power. He seems to have anticipated the cries of Gazan mothers whose children have been multilated by the Israeli military. In ‘When Evil Comes Like Falling Rain’, he wrote, ‘When evil comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop’, When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible, When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries too fall like rain in summer.’
In the last verse of ‘Prayer Before Birth’, Irish poet Louis Macneice warned of the dangers of indifference to contemporary cruelties. ‘I am not yet born; O fill me, with strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face…’
In ‘To Those Born Later’, Brecht gave a similar warning, ‘Truly I live in dark times. The guileless word is folly. A smooth forehead suggests insensitivity. The man who laughs has simply not heard the terrible news.’
For the lives of Palestinians
Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine challenges poets to express hope by digging deep. National poet Mahmoud Darwish warned, ‘We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if travelling is the way of the clouds… We have a country of words. Speak, speak so we may know the end of this travel.’
Rasha Abdulhadi speaks about the role of literature in fighting genocide. She pleads, ‘Whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now.’
From the Gaza Strip, Mosa Abu Toha describes how to be a lyric poet when life is a violent epic. In ‘Forest of Noise’ he maintains, ‘Every child in Gaza is me, Every mother and father are me. Every house is my heart. Every tale is my leg. Every plant is my arm. Every flower is my eye. Every hole in the earth is my wound.’
On December 27, 2023, just before being killed by an Israeli air strike, Refaat Alareer wrote ’If I Must Die.’ ‘If I must die, you must live to tell my story, to sell my things, to buy a piece of cloth and some strings (make it white with a long tail) so that a child somewhere in Gaza …sees my kite you made, flying up above and thinks for a moment an angel is there bringing back love. If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.’
Other sources of hope
In times of despair, hope becomes a rope to grasp. In ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’, Maya Angelou, American human rights activist and poet, declared that in spite of violence and oppression, she wanted to regard human existence as sacred, hence her assurance, ‘The same people who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and dagger, nevertheless have mouths from which may come songs of exquisite sweetness.’
British-American poet W.H Auden was not so optimistic but in ‘September 1, 1939’ he gave humanity his prescription, ‘All I have is a voice, To undo the folded lie, And the lie of Authority… There is no such thing as the State, We must love one another or die.’
When despair over the return of Trump persists, when even temporary ceasefires seem unlikely in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine or Sudan, it would be salutary to consult poets who have described qualities of non violence and taught how to make peace. In her incisive work, ‘Making Peace’ poet Denise Levertov advises, ‘A voice from the dark called out, The poets must give us imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster. Peace, not only the absence of war…A line of peace might appear if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, questioned our needs, allowed long pauses…Peace , a presence, an energy field more intense than war, might pulse then, stanza by stanza into the world…’
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